NIS applies for new US sanctions waiver ahead of September deadline

Serbia’s state-linked oil company Naftna Industrija Srbije, better known as NIS, filed for a new waiver from the US Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control on September 24, 2026, six days before its existing license was set to expire on September 30. The application keeps the company in a now-familiar holding pattern: buying time through regulatory channels while a landmark ownership transfer slowly works its way to the finish line.

NIS supplies up to 80% of Serbia’s fuel needs and operates the Pančevo refinery, the country’s primary crude processing facility. Without a continued waiver, those operations could be forced to halt, triggering fuel shortages across a country that has no immediate alternative supplier waiting in the wings.

How NIS ended up here

The company’s sanctions exposure traces back to its ownership structure. Russia’s Gazprom Neft holds roughly 44.9% of NIS, and another Gazprom entity controls approximately 11.3%, giving Russian state-linked interests a combined majority position. When Washington tightened sanctions on Russia’s energy sector in October 2025, NIS was caught in the crossfire despite being a Serbian company operating on Serbian soil.

OFAC’s approach has been pragmatic rather than punitive: grant short-term waivers while pushing for a structural fix, meaning the exit of Russian ownership. That approach has produced a series of rolling extensions, with previous waivers running through July 31, August 28, and then September 30, 2026.

The structural fix OFAC has been waiting for took shape on January 19, 2026, when Hungary’s MOL signed an agreement to acquire a combined 56.16% stake in NIS, absorbing both the Gazprom Neft and Gazprom holdings. MOL is a publicly traded, Budapest-headquartered energy company with existing operations across Central and Eastern Europe. The deal, if completed, would effectively sever NIS’s Russian ownership ties and remove the primary justification for sanctions exposure.

Serbia’s position in a complicated geopolitical landscape

Serbia is an EU candidate state but not an EU member, which means it has not adopted EU sanctions against Russia. Belgrade has consistently framed NIS’s uninterrupted operation as a matter of national energy security rather than political alignment, and the Serbian government’s own 29.9% stake in the company gives it a direct financial interest in keeping the lights on at Pančevo.

The crude itself arrives via the JANAF pipeline, a Croatian infrastructure link that connects Mediterranean import terminals to refineries across the region. That routing has allowed NIS to keep importing and processing crude throughout the sanctions period, with each waiver explicitly permitting continued use of that supply chain. A lapse in the waiver would freeze those imports, not just the refinery’s domestic distribution.